Current techniques for thermal management involves increasing the surface area of the heatsink or the thermal dissipation device. As an example, heatsinks may increase the number of fins that protrude from the heatsink so heat can quickly be moved away from a device, such as semiconductor. However, in some instances where the heatsink is not sufficient to move heat away from the device then the device must use techniques such as thermal throttling whereby the device must suspend or limit activities it is performing until the heat generation is below one or more thresholds.
Heatsinks are used to remove heat away from the semiconductor to avoid the semiconductor from becoming unstable and allow the semiconductor to continue to operate. Thermal management, beyond heatsinks, has become a new practice for personal computing via laptops but is also a concern for smartphones, etc. In smartphones, some techniques involve throttling the device's performance, moving computations and resource requests to different parts of the device (e.g. utilizing a second core central processing unit, or utilizing a graphics processing unit), etc. as ways to manage thermal dissipation.